Diets Are Dumb

There are practical reasons why dieting never works. No food plan can possibly substitute for the emotional support and nourishment our current difficulties are trying to distract us from noticing. Until we find more effective ways to actually meet these needs, survival will demand we continue to ignore their existence. We will in other words continue to have problems with "weight"--when what we are truly having problems with is our heart.

Submitted:Aug 10, 2010
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Y'all health nut "diet experts" are idiots. Everyone keeps
writing all of these articles that say they have something new to
say about how to lose weight, but they never do. The point is, no
one who is afraid of what losing weight might mean is ever going
to do it. Those of us who are overweight are overweight because
something about it appeals to us. Instead of getting to the root
of our issues, we obsess about whether we fit into a size six or
a size fourteen or anywhere between because talking about weight
is an acceptable topic for women in this country.

Most of us women are not encouraged to talk about whether we are
happy except in terms of whether we have what we want in life,
i.e. thinness. Our sense of satisfaction or contentment is
supposed to come from whether we believe we will be able to STAY
thin, or so we have been told.

We live in a capitalist country. It doesn't matter how we feel,
it matters what we have. Thus, when we talk about feelings, what
we are really talking about is how close we are to having
everything we want.

As women, we are told that being "good" means prioritizing men's
needs over our own. We are also told there are limited resources
in the world, and we are reassured again and again of this with
various worldwide images of starvation and environmental
degradation. Thus, being a good person if one is a woman implies
that one is attempting to be as thin as possible in order to
leave more resources for the men around us.

This is what is called a "scarcity" perspective on the world. The
resources of the world are being consumed at a ridiculously fast
clip by the attempts of a small number of people to own the
world. We all play along, agreeing there could not possibly
enough food in this world or even this country to feed every
starving person. Meanwhile, so many of us FEEL as though we are
starving for so much of the time that we intuitively believe this
fallacy. Most of us are nutritionally deprived of some vitamin or
component used to catalyze protein production, or else we eat
salad all the time when our bodies are craving fat. We take our
feelings that there is not enough food in the world as reality,
instead of recognizing that we have the choice not to do this to
ourselves.

How many women do you know who starve themselves, then go out and
buy pounds of food that they will throw up later? How many other
people remain at around 600 pounds because that is easier than
learning how to date at forty? How many other women remain at 100
pounds because they cannot face their anger at the stepfathers
who molested them or the babysitters who raped them or the
teachers who hit on them? We do not have eating disorders because
we are stupid or because we don't know that we are hurting
ourselves. We are as aware of this as the U.S. government is that
prioritizing business interests is destroying their home as fast
as ours. We are all well aware of the destruction we are causing.